


Refraction

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 00:27:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3589455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>White light, they discovered, could be passed through a crystal and split into seven colours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Refraction

White light - the Ñoldor discovered when they began to shape crystal, to grind glass - may be split, broken, into a spectrum. It was Fëanáro who discovered it, but not Fëanáro who placed the distinctions, drew the lines to delineate the spectrum neatly into seven .(“For why seven? And why those divisions? They are not even the same size. It is arbitrary, a tradition which has little meaning or importance.” And yet he too recognised that it was at least useful to draw a distinction somewhere.)

In later years, the system gained a different connotation, made of whispers in the towns and streets of the new world as people cradled their crystals and lampstones, treasured relics of a vanished world across the sea.

People talked. They imagined and poeticised. 

It started with Fëanor. While he lived, he was white light, all agreed, with his burning silver eyes, burning white hot with the light he locked away in his heart, keeping him alive. White light was perfect. White light, he thought, was pure, would keep the shadows and marrings and the darkness at bay, would protect them in its illuminating glow. White light held in the hand of a little lost boy grown up, a boy who missed the brightness of his mother’s silver hair and silver needles and quick laughter. But, as all know, you cannot look too long at the white light, or risk being blinded. And nothing burns white hot for long.

Then red Maedhros, heat and blood and the steady glow of hot coals, tempered like beaten steel. He is warmth and a defiantly beating heart, a flame that burns slowly but will carry on until the bitter end, before flaring out in a red inferno.

Maglor is orange. There are orange trees in the wide rolling lands he holds, improbably, and he sits beneath them and sings a song like orange blossom honey, closing his eyes until the flames come and devour it all. Much later, he looks out at a copper orange sunset on the sea and wishes the sooty glowing flames had claimed him too. The sun sets in the west, orange on the horizon, but it is too bright for him to look at. He is the autumn of the world, and he is fading. 

Golden-yellow Celegorm once would sit in a mallorn tree and laugh, smiling like the noonday sun. He has the eyes of a wolf. 

Caranthir’s green is not of his own choosing. Nor are the lands into which he flees, the dark green woods of the Nandor. Nor is the green of the banners of the traitors, who served him and sold him and his brothers to the enemy. Green for the serpents and those they dupe, he thinks bitterly. Green was never of his own choosing.

Blue Curufin is calm, he is icy inner stillness from which power comes, deadly sharpness and poise. Blue-white, white-hot, in its brightness almost like the white source. But not quite; there is still something missing. He knows it, somewhere deep inside him.  

Indigo Amrod or violet Amras, many say, is another arbitrary distinction, the two shades blurring together, the line between them haphazardly placed, for the sake of definition, really. And yet these two certainly have a line between them; indigo pressed eagerly close the others, with violet slipping off the spectrum, fading at the edge into the world that the eye cannot see. 

Light refracts, they say in the books. One must take the white light, split it, break it, so it is no longer recognisable. And yet the light still exists, divided in neat divisions instigated, simply and fully, by the people who wrote them down.


End file.
